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This is one of the petty annoyances of actually knowing what you're talking about on any specific subject. Finding people who aren't as specialist as you are making a hash of a claim in your field. So here's today's petty annoyance for me:

The pint-sized – in astronomical terms – asteroid that's scheduled to buzz the Earth this Friday may have a street space value of about $195bn.

"Unfortunately, the path of asteroid 2012 DA14 is tilted relative to Earth, requiring too much energy to chase it down for mining," say the wannabe space prospectors at Deep Space Industries (DSI), undoubtedly disappointed to watch that $195bn sail back off into space.

No. The value of any lump of rock is not the value of the metals trapped within it. It is the value of those trapped metals minus the cost of untrapping them. Thus that calculation of value by Deep Space Industries is simply wrong.

So, for example, a mountain of iron ore out in the Australian Outback is not worth the same as that same tonnage of iron ore sitting outside a steel plant in China. We must subtract the costs of tearing the mountain apart, grading the ore, building a railroad to the coast for it, the cost of the ships to transport it to China and, crucially, the cost of the finance to do all of this.

Similarly, those reports from a few years ago that Afghanistan has a trillion dollars worth of lithium, or copper, out there in the boonies. No, it doesn't. We must calculate the cost of extracting and refining it which, in that part of the world at least, would presumably include a fairly serious security bill.

It's the same with our asteroid. That $195 billion value rests upon two assumptions. The first, that there are no costs associated with going up there and mining it. The second, they are assuming the value of those materials in space, not the value down here. And they are calculating that value by taking the price on Earth and then adding the cost of boosting it into space.

Hmm.

On the first point, the costs of actually mining that asteroid. Well, at present, no one can actually do that. It's simply not possible. Thus the price of mining it is infinite. $195 billion minus infinity is less than nothing.

On the second point, well, no one is able to make use of those products up in space at present, there just is no market at all. So even if point one fails, the value is still zero for that asteroid: for there just ain't no one to buy it.

A useful little guide to the metals and minerals business for you. There's dirt and there's ore. Ore is where the things that you can extract from the dirt are worth more than the cost of extracting them. At our current level of technology asteroids are dirt, not ore.